The creators of HBO's hit fantasy drama Game of Thrones talk to Ed Cumming about
the challenges of adapting George RR Martin's sprawling novels.

The two men responsible for bringing George RR Martin’s epic, thousand-page novels to the small screen are David Benioff and DB Weiss. They’ve spent well over six years on the project, and they make a good double act. Benioff is as smooth a literary New Yorker as you could imagine. The son of a banker and married to the actress Amanda Peet, he was famously paid $1m for a draft script of the blockbuster Troy, and has also written novels. Weiss is slightly geekier, in glasses and a comic book t-shirt, but also writes scripts for blockbuster movies and novels. As well as overseeing the scripts, they produce the show for HBO, and are responsible for working out precisely how much of Martin’s exuberant vision can make it to television.

What are the challenges in creating the series?

DB: The main one is trying to be faithful to the books while recognising that it’s an adaptation, so it can’t be quite the same. It’s an adaptation of a Song of Ice and Fire as a whole, rather than individual books, so we have to bear in mind the bigger picture.

DBW: If we didn’t love the books we wouldn’t have spent the last six years trying to do it.

DB: One of the problems is one of scale – trying to find the through lines and making it coherent within a television structure.

DB: We’ve been very gratified. The show needs to stand alone for people who haven’t read the books, and people seem to recognise that. Overwhelmingly the fan community seem to understand that we love the books as much as they do.

What is it about A Song of Ice and Fire that makes it so appealing?

DB: The characters. From the first book; the moment where Bran Stark is pushed out of the window, I realised I was reading something different from any other fantasy novel. Any other novel, in fact. You become so immersed in the characters, and develop so much affection for them, and then all these horrible things happen to them. When Ned Stark dies, it makes you very tense. Once you realise that heroes die, everything becomes that much more terrifying.

DBW: I think it’s that you have the opportunity to go to this amazing fantasy world that is populated with people that you might have dinner with. Their concerns are the same as your concerns.

Can you see yourself stepping back in seasons to come?

DB: One of the things that attracted us most to the project is that it’s 8 or 9 seasons and it’s one story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. On other shows, the writing staff just come up with the story for the next season. The idea that we’re telling an 80 or 90-hour story appealed to us, so I can’t see why we wouldn’t want to see it through.

DBW: I can’t imagine being able to step back from it.

Do you have any favourite characters?

DBW: That’s like asking us to choose between children.

DB: But if there’s one in the second season it’s Theon Greyjoy. He has a fascinating arc, and Alfie Allen brings it out so well. It’s great to watch.

How aware of budget restrictions were you?

DBW: (both laughing) Very much. There are always going to be things that you want to do any you wouldn’t be able to do. So you have to work out what you really want to do. We decided that we really wanted to do the Battle of the Blackwater. We tried to really protect it, and set aside dollars and time. In the end we still had to beg HBO for more money, though.

DB: Luckily they were very generous.

DBW: But also we feel that grand spectacle is not really the feeling of the show. It’s more of a worms-eye, ground level view, with all the point of view characters. Sometimes you don’t want sweeping spectacle shots of 100,000 orcs. It distances you from the world.

DB: If you see 100,000 orcs rushing it doesn’t seem like one person’s point of view.

There seems to be lots of sex. Did you add any of the sex?

DB: If we’d shown all of the sex in the book we’d be behind bars right now.

DBW: There’s a lot of sexual content in the books. Some of it involves children, and we couldn’t film it for legal and moral reasons.

DBW: But the sex is one of the things that we like about the books – the characters really think about it.

Have you cut characters?

DB: We told George RR Martin when we started that if we included every character in the books they’d only get about 45 seconds on screen each, so you can’t include them all. Still, I don’t think there’s a bigger cast in television, and I don’t think there’s a story that asks you to bear in mind so many different stories.

DBW: A lot of it is comes down to where a character becomes really important to the story. Some come in earlier or later, but overall I think it’s true to the story of the books. Still, you need to keep one eye on the current series, because if that’s not right then we’ll never get to hour 75. We try to make sure the experience of watching is as satisfying as possible.